ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KAUST achieve a new supercomputing milestone

​​​​ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have achieved a new supercomputing milestone by scaling ANSYS Fluent to nearly 200,000 processor cores. This record represents a more than five-fold increase over the record set just three years ago, which will enable organizations to make critical decisions faster and increase the overall efficiency of oil and gas production facilities.

The calculations were run on the Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, hosted at the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab (KSL). By leveraging high-performance computing (HPC), ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and the KSL sped up a complex simulation of a separation vessel from several weeks to an overnight run. This simulation is critical to all oil and gas production facilities – empowering organizations around the world to reduce design development time and better predict equipment performance under varying operational conditions. Saudi Aramco will apply this technology to make more-informed, timely decisions to retrofit separation vessels to optimize operation throughout an oil field's lifetime.

"Today's regulatory requirements and market expectations mean that manufacturers must develop products that are cleaner, safer, more efficient and more reliable," said Wim Slagter, director of HPC and cloud alliances at ANSYS. "To reach such targets, designers and engineers must understand product performance with higher accuracy than ever before – especially for separation technologies, where an improved separation performance can immediately increase the efficiency and profitability of an oil field. The supercomputing collaboration between ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KSL enabled enhanced insight in complex gas, water and crude-oil flows inside a separation vessel, which include liquid free-surface, phase mixing and droplets settling phenomena."

On October 28, 2016 the KAUST Cray XC40 supercomputer Shaheen, the fastest supercomputer in the Middle East, made headlines when it completed the world's first trillion cell reservoir simulation. Read more here​.

"Our oil and gas facilities are among the largest in the world. We selected a complex representative application – a multiphase gravity separation vessel – to confirm the value of HPC in reducing turnover time, which is critical to our industry," said Ehab Elsaadawy, computational modeling specialist and oil treatment team leader at Saudi Aramco's Research and Development Center. "By working with strategic partner, KAUST, we can now run these complex simulations in one day instead of weeks."

"Multiphase problems are complex and require multiple global synchronizations, making them harder to scale than single phase laminar or turbulent flow simulation. Unstructured mesh and complex geometry add further complexity," said Jysoo Lee, director, KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab. "Our scalability tests are not just designed for the sake of obtaining scalability at scale. This was a typical Aramco separation vessel with typical operation conditions, and larger core counts are added to reduce the time to solution. ANSYS provides a viable tool for Saudi Aramco to solve their design and analysis problems at full capacity of Shaheen. And for KAUST-Aramco R&D collaboration, this is our first development work. There are more projects in the pipeline."